One of the first things you’ll notice about Microsoft Office Excel 2007 is that the user interface has changed quite a bit. Earlier versions of Excel had well over a thousand commands scattered among the program’s menus and toolbars; what’s more, some useful commands didn’t appear on any of the menus or toolbars! In Excel 2007, you need to look in only one place for the tools you need to use Excel: the ribbon at the top of the program window. If you’ve used Excel before, you’ll only need to spend a little bit of time working with the user interface to use the program skillfully. If you’re new to Excel, you’ll have a much easier time learning to use the program than you would have with the older user interface.
This section of the book introduces many of the new features in Excel 2007: the new user interface and especially the ribbon, the improved formatting capabilities provided by galleries and the Mini toolbar, the new capabilities offered by data tables, the new color management scheme, and the improved charting engine. You also have some new ways to manage the data in your workbooks. For example, you can tell Excel how to format your data based on its value, summarize your data by using new functions, and save your workbooks as documents in other useful file formats.
The most obvious change to the user interface is the ribbon, which replaces all the menus and toolbars you may be familiar with. After you’ve entered your data into a worksheet, you can change the data’s appearance, summarize it, or sort it, using the commands on the ribbon. Unlike previous versions of Excel, which made you hunt through a complex toolbar and menu system to find the commands you wanted, everything you want to do can now be found in one place.
The ribbon divides its commands into seven tabs: Home, Insert, Page Layout, Formulas, Data, Review, and View. The following graphic shows the Home tab, which appears when you start Excel.
The Home tab contains a series of groups: Clipboard, Font, Alignment, Number, Styles, Cells, and Editing. Each group, in turn, hosts a series of controls that enable you to perform tasks related to that group (font formatting, cell alignment, number formats, and so on). Clicking a control with a downward-pointing arrow displays a menu or palette that contains further options; if an option has an ellipses (...) after the item’s name, clicking the item displays a dialog box. You can also open a dialog box by clicking the Dialog Expander control at the bottom right corner of a group; that control looks like a square than contains an arrow pointing down and to the right.
Finally, you’ll see the Microsoft Office button at the top left corner of the Excel program window. Clicking the Microsoft Office button enables you to save a workbook, create new workbooks, print a worksheet, change the Excel program options, and quit Excel.
